Hard Drive Failure?

[novacaine98]

I have a Western Digital 250GB HD and controller card. My computer is a Dell Dimensin 4550 from 2003. I've had this for 2yrs now and everything has been fine until I guess sometime last night. I was out and my computer was shutdown however we suffered a power outage at my house. When I came home to day and booted up my computer I got this message:

ultra100TX2 BIOS is not installed because there are no drives attatched

I have tried using different cables, placing the controller card in a different pci slot but I always get that message. Does anyone know what the problem is? Is it possible to save my hard drive because I had a lot of stuff on it?

I tried to connect the hard drive straight to my motherboard and bypass the controller card. When I did this the Dell Bios recognized the HD when I went into bios, however it then gave me a disk read error and said I had to reboot.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Tony9508]

Uh........:amazed: you could try to get another HDD with windows set it as master and set ur 250 as slave........boot from the master hdd and see if window's pick's it up ur 250 slave...if it does then you could try to check/scan it it with a disk utility....that's all I can think to do......!...?

 

[Bruce]

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=23

try making a dos floppy of the data lifeguard tools.boot from it and run the diagnostics.

 

[Nitestick]

wow the first time i get to say this . check the guide on the 137gb barrier and you'll know why the hdd wouldn't work on the motherboard. my guess is your controller card was fried. but first i would try resetting the CMOS.

 

[Bruce]

wow the first time i get to say this . check the guide on the 137gb barrier and you'll know why the hdd wouldn't work on the motherboard. my guess is your controller card was fried. but first i would try resetting the CMOS.

I have that same card and the bios always recognized the full capacity though, it was the driver that didnt.

Is it set on cable select?

 

[novacaine98]

My brother has a blank 120GB Western Digital HD. I decided to see if the controller card would recognize his HD so I installed it and sure enough it did. I then decided to install windows xp on his hd. I set his HD to master and mine to slave. I turned the computer back on and allowed it to boot up. On the initial boot I got the same message of ultatx100 bios not loading cause no drives were attatched. I then hit ctrl,alt,del for a restart. After the restart the controller card recognized both HDs. Then it said "disk read error press ctrl,alt,del to restart." I did this and when it came back up it only recognized the 120GB HD. Does this mean anything?

How do I reset the cmos? I got the newest bios from dell and flashed it.

 

[Nitestick]

whoa bruce you've built your posts fast!!! you only joined when myself and h4x3r posted that guide right? anyway its just he said that he tried the drive on the motherboards controller, i'm thinking its the motherboards controller that isn't reading the hdd at the moment because it can't and that the controller card is damaged but the hdd is fine.

 

[Nitestick]

you flashed the bios after the rpoblem right? not before? thats strange, does your brother mind if you try to format his hdd? see if you can borrow another drive larger than 137gb from somewhere to see if that is recognised. either that or try your hdd in another rig you know will work with hdd's larger than 137gb

 

[Bruce]

whoa bruce you've built your posts fast!!! you only joined when myself and h4x3r posted that guide right? anyway its just he said that he tried the drive on the motherboards controller, i'm thinking its the motherboards controller that isn't reading the hdd at the moment because it can't and that the controller card is damaged but the hdd is fine.

Yea im still a n00b

I hope his drives not dead, it would suck otherwise.

maybe you should add to the 137gb post about not making your boot partition bigger than 120gb?

 

[novacaine98]

My brother said to do whatever I want with the drive since its blank. He has the same computer as me so I put my controller card and hd in his computer and it didn't work.

However I just restarted my computer with both HDs in it and I planned on installing windows xp on his. When the controller card bios thing came up, it recognized both HDs. I put in my western digital data lifguard floppy and tried to run the test but it wouldn't work and said self test failure.

I don't have another hd bigger than 137gb and I don't know any one else who does.